Traditionally, traders and investors who desired to buy or sell securities placed orders with brokers who traded on the floor of organized stock exchanges, such as the New York Stock Exchange or the NASDAQ market. Traders and investors, particularly institutional investors, are increasingly balking at the high cost of trading on organized exchanges and in the OTC (Over-The-Counter) market. Discontent with the expense of using intermediaries and the cost of market impact has contributed to the development of the electronic fourth market for crossing trades. See "Reshaping the Equity Markets, A Guide for the 1990s" by Robert A. Schwartz, Harper Business, 1991, especially at pp. 93-95.
Various companies and exchanges operate computerized crossing networks, also called anonymous matching systems. By way of example, crossing networks used in connection with the trading of trading instruments are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,412,287, which discloses an automated stock exchange in which a computer matches buy and sell orders for a variety of stocks; U.S. Pat. No. 3,573,747, which discloses an anonymous trading system for selling fungible properties between subscribers to the system; U.S. Pat. No. 3,581,072, which discloses the use of a special purpose digital computer for matching orders and establishing market prices in an auction market for fungible goods; U.S. Pat. No. 4,674,044, which discloses an automated securities trading system; U.S. Pat. No. 5,136,501, which discloses an anonymous matching system for effectuating trades through automatic matching in which buyers and sellers who are willing to trade with one another based on specified criteria, such as price, quantity and credit, may automatically trade when matching events occur satisfying these criteria; and U.S. Pat. No. 5,101,353, which discloses an automated system for providing liquidity to securities markets in which orders are entered by the system and executed in real time either internally between system users or externally with stock exchanges and markets.
Crossing networks have a number of advantages, including: (a) traders need not search for a contraparty; and (b) anonymity is preserved.
Existing facilities for crossing trades include Instinet's Crossing Network and POSIT (Portfolio System for Institutional Trading) which is owned by ITG, Inc. The Instinet Crossing Network has an equities trading service to match buyers and sellers anonymously at set times. Computers pair buyers with sellers on a time priority basis. Trades are executed at the closing price for exchange-listed issues, and at the midpoint of the inside market (best bid and ask) for OTC issues.
POSIT, for example, enables large investors to trade baskets of stocks among themselves. The orders are sent to a central computer where they are electronically matched with other orders. Unlike Instinet's Crossing Network, POSIT crosses are done at discreet times during the day. The prices are obtained from those quoted on the exchanges, a practice known as "parasitic pricing." See "Reshaping the Equity Markets, A Guide for the 1990s" cited above.
Instinet, owned by Reuters, also operates an electronic trading system that facilitates the negotiation of trades between institutional investors and brokers. Instinet allows parties to trade anonymously, entering bids and offers electronically. Instinet subscribers can respond to an "order" entered into the system either by matching a displayed price or by making a counter bid car offer that is transmitted electronically to the counter parties. The trades that result from these negotiations become public information only when they are executed. This procedure provides an alternative to the direct human-to-human negotiation of orders in the upstairs market or on the trading floors. Instinet provides a limit order book for over-the-counter (OTC) securities and listed securities and also provides inside quotes for exchange listed securities for the seven U.S. exchanges on which stocks can be traded and for NASDAQ listed securities.
Many crossing networks function independently of existing stock exchanges. However, some crossing networks are operated by stock exchanges.
For example, the Market Match Exchange ("MMX") is operated by the Chicago Stock Exchange. All matched orders are executed at a random time within a predetermined ten minute window at the market price at such time. The market price is calculated based upon the midpoint of the spread of a particular issue. Rather than matching orders on the basis of time priority, the MMX system uses liquidity fees and liquidity credits to determine the level of priority for order matching. Those users willing to pay the highest liquidity fee have the highest execution priority. See 59 F.R. 5451 (Feb. 4, 1994).
Crossing networks that automatically match buy and sell orders often concentrate trading at a single point of time, and can be called a batch process matching system. There is a need, however, for an anonymous crossing network that continuously, and in real-time, satisfies the buying and selling desires of an arbitrary number of market participants.
A major problem encountered in the design of crossing networks is that of determining how to match buyers and sellers. Existing approaches to this problem include:
Take-out strategies, where overlapping bids and offers are matched at the midpoint of the overlapped bid and ask prices, with priority given to buyers and sellers in order of price. This assumes a significant quantity of non-disclosed orders in the system; otherwise, there would be no incentive for overlap, and take-out would start at the disclosed best bid/offer prices, just like the Instinet book. PA1 Single price auction strategies, where a single, size-weighted average price is computed from overlapping bid and offer prices, and everyone is filled at that price. Again, traders would have to be confident of a significant number of non-disclosed orders in the system to have the incentive to enter orders at a better price than the best disclosed price. PA1 Premium strategies (as in the Chicago MMX system), where bids and offers have an associated positive or negative premium, and crossing takes place at the midpoint of market spread or at the minimum necessary premium differential from the midpoint, with priority given in order of premium. Here, the premium-based priority in matching provides the incentive for offering higher premiums.
Each of the above approaches is a batch process that relies upon ad hoc rules of competition among a relatively small set of discrete orders as being the means of arbitrating the crossing network participants' buy/sell entries.
In the real world of trading, orders to buy or sell can enter the market at any time, and discrete orders often represent only an approximate and partial expression of the order fill that would satisfy the trader. For institutional traders in particular, an individual order seldom represents the full desired fill size, and the trader must then employ multiple orders at different prices (and generally in different markets) to achieve his ultimate fill.
Typically, existing crossing networks allow discrete buy or sell orders to be entered, e.g., "sell 10,000 IBM at 64." However, as stated above many traders, particularly institutional traders, wish to deal in baskets of securities, so that, for example, a portfolio is as far as possible, "balanced." Existing crossing networks do not easily allow traders to enter combinations of orders, such as "sell 10,000 IBM at 64 only if I can buy 20,000 DEC at 32". Furthermore, existing crossing networks do not allow traders to enter combinations of orders, such as "sell 10,000 IBM at 64 or sell 100,000 IBM at 63." Traders often have trading strategies such as, for example, "buy 3,000 IBM at 63, but if I can buy 5,000, I would be prepared to pay 63 and 1/2", that cannot be handled by existing crossing networks.
Given the above limitations of conventional crossing networks, a more satisfactory approach to the overall problem of continuously satisfying the buying and selling desires of an arbitrary number of market participants is needed. Furthermore, a crossing network is needed that will guarantee mathematical optimality of the matching process, so that each participant is assured that the overall outcome of the process (in terms of the price and size of all fills) has maximized the joint satisfaction of all participants.
Price discovery is an important market feature, but in many markets, is often not explicit. The call market opening procedure used on the NYSE, for example, enables determination of an opening price. Further, consolidation of the public order flow on the trading floor of the NYSE gives the exchange specialists a more comprehensive knowledge of buy/sell propensities in the broader market for an issue. The OTC market does not have an explicit price discovery mechanism, such as the call market opening procedure used by the NYSE. OTC dealers sense the public's buy/sell propensities by posting quotes and observing the market's response. Moreover, existing crossing networks use parasitic pricing methods, and therefore depend on the existence of another market in the same instruments.